A fathers day painting for my daddy. I do like a good magpie (or two) – such intelligent birds, they always look like they’re plotting, pondering what to do next…

The intention was to paint a beautiful, detailed perfect magpie card – this A3 page started off as a mess of practice sketches! As is so often the way, when I came to working on the “real” picture, I just couldn’t get him to look right… all sorts of peculiar-looking pigeons and penguins were appearing on the paper. So back I went and added some gorgeous colour and splodgy ink to this page – really chuffed with this picture, and I think my father likes it too. It is now up in my parents kitchen; high praise indeed.

I was approached by the Fashion and Textile Museum in London following my degree show in 2011, and went on to sell work through their shop. Some of this work was a series of rosettes – commemorative, awards for the little things; signifying important parts of time that have passed. Time that has been lived through. Badge of honour. A cathartic underlining of events. And move on.

I tried something different, took a step outside of my comfort zone. It must have been a sunny day. These paintings are the wrong tone, the wrong colour. They do not suit me. Back I went to blues and reds…

Self-portraiture; this tells a story. A sketch of muddled thoughts, sewn without over-thinking. A satisfying way to work, it is nice to look over old art; funny how it all joins together (and sometimes makes sense).

I started this pair of paintings side by side, with the intention of mirroring, a sort of butterfly effect. I ended up spending much more time on the left-hand painting… to its detriment.

I much prefer the more minimalist left hand painting, which took only a few minutes, simple brush strokes, beautiful colours – the paint moved across the paper, bled, arranged itself serendipitously and left a lovely splodge.

How can a couple of minutes work look so much better than half an hour of laboured painting?! And will everyone else see the same as me?

That has always been The Big Question – when to stop painting? When have you over-worked an ruined a once delicate, understated, confident piece of work? How on earth do you know when to stop? I guess it all comes down to intuition. And experience. Practice (and plenty of frustrating mistakes, screwed up sketchbook pages. There’s no going back.)

Very much an experimental piece. Horizontal brush strokes, cross-based composition (I’ve been playing around this for a while), and of course beautiful white blank paper and the usual muted palette. The painting exists on the surface of the paper, the paper is part of the work, not simply a material for the paint to rest on, an after thought; the painting isn’t the object. There is a difference. I’m not certain that makes sense – must work on my articulation. Maybe another day.